The Rural Clinical School treats students to a real taste of the bush

Stick a bunch of kiddies in the bandaid section of a supermarket and what are they going to choose: the dull, fabric type or the shiny Wiggles and fairytale princess strips? Bit of a no brainer, really.

Apply the same principle to rural Australian hospitals with doctors seeking employment and you'd think that the new, state of the art Hedland Health Campus would be a popular choice for medical practitioners. After all, the year old hospital, promised since Cyclone Joan took out the old one in 1975, gleams. Yet for all its newness and fairytale sparkle, Hedland Health Campus still struggles to attract a full complement of permanent doctors.

Here's where the Rural Clinical School of Western Australia comes in. The RCSWA is a collaboration between the University of Western Australia and the University of Notre Dame Australia in which medical students apply to complete their entire penultimate year of study in a country location around the state. The hope is they'll finish their training and return to be rural doctors. More than a dozen site choices range from Esperance and Narrogin to Karratha, Broome and Kununurra. Interestingly, despite older doctors not racing to the bush, these students compete fiercely for a place in the program.

Port Hedland's 2012 cohort of five students has arrived and they're more excited than kids in a Bandaids-R-Us superstore. Student Mariana Dorkham sees the hospital as an incredible facility and the program a boon. "The RCS can offer a more hands on, personalised approach to medicine and I think ultimately that will provide us with better experience and improve our clinical skills."

Ms Dorkham's colleague Jacinta Cox adds that in the city she'd potentially be at the back of 15 people seeing a patient. Here she's looking forward to working individually with small teams. Ms Buters, meanwhile, beams at the mention of potentially being involved with births.

Port Hedland is a remote location some might consider as, well, "fugly" - in the words of Tim Winton, reflecting on the Australian country town aesthetic in his book Smalltown. Yet student Kyria Laird just sees its potential, saying that she's eager to embrace the whole culture. Ms Laird's colleague Justin Winters agrees that the Pilbara is the place to be at the moment; it blew him away. "There's a lot here which is very special and people come from around the world just to see things like Karijini [National Park]."

RCSWA Port Hedland medical coordinator Dr Rob Whitehead is delighted students elect to come to an area where there is a great deal of workforce need. "I think this is still a very radical program - the idea of bringing up five student doctors to such a remote area of the state and trying to train them for the entire year."

So, 10 years down the track, is RCSWA just a gimmicky bandaid solution or is it working?

Dr Whitehead is observing the latter. "One of the nicest things about being involved in this program is the opportunity to see our former student doctors return as fully fledged medical practitioners to rural towns in which they trained." Recently, previous Port Hedland RCSWA student Dr Stephanie Breen returned to live and to work at the Hedland Health Campus and Dr Whitehead says, "It just shows the value of the work that local communities put into these programs when we see keen and highly talented young doctors returning to serve the people of rural Western Australia."